George Stephanopoulos, Anchor of ABC’s This Week and Good Morning America

“I’m a relative newbie to TM. I’ve only been doing it about two years. But I can say from my personal experience that it has made all the difference in my life. And I have to admit that I came to it as a skeptic. I mean, ‘How can it be that sitting quietly for 20 minutes twice a day could make you the person you were meant to be. I just didn’t believe it. But it really does click for me and for so many people increasingly around the world. And what I am so excited about is the work that the David Lynch Foundation is doing now to bring that to people who may need it.”

“Every human being has a treasury within. Unbounded intelligence, creativity, love, energy, peace, and happiness is there. Transcendental Meditation is a technique, an ancient form of meditation brought back for this time by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and it’s like being given a little golden key that opens the door to that treasury within.”

“As great a skeptic as you may be, and I do encourage anyone who is not doing TM to be a skeptic and come at it with that perspective, because when you look at the information about it, it’s quite impactful.

“Take for example high blood pressure, the number one cause of aging and all the risk factors you might have, and it primarily ages you by taking the arteries of the body and rusting them away from the inside. Especially if the blood pressure is related to issues that are emotional in your life, it’s profoundly effective.

“Doctors actually have done double-blind, randomized, controlled studies—those are the gold-standard studies that we look at—and found dramatic reductions, not just in blood pressure which can be reduced as much as medications in some cases, but also almost 50% reductions in things like incidences of atherosclerosis, heart attack rates, even death rates in some studies. So these aren’t subtle little changes. They’re dramatic shifts.”

“I love what the David Lynch Foundation is doing at every single level—at-risk kids in schools around the world, veterans who have post-traumatic stress like my father had, also women in need. It’s incredible what they’re doing.”

“I started meditating about a year ago. It’s been really important for me in my life. Women and veterans and people who have had traumas happen to them need help in healing and knowing how to deal with those experiences. I think that it’s very important for everyone.”

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In the past seven years, the Foundation has provided scholarships to more than 250,000 at-risk adults and children to meditate.